R. Steven Notley

R. Steven Notley is Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins on the New York City campus of Nyack College (2001-present) and director of the graduate programs in Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins. He received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University, where he studied with David Flusser. Notley lived sixteen years in Jerusalem, during which time he was the founding chair of the New Testament Studies program at the Jerusalem University College. He is the author of many books and articles. He continues collaborative research and publication with Israeli scholars in the fields of historical geography, ancient Judaism and Christian origins. Among his list of publications, he co-authored with Flusser the historical biography, The Sage from Galilee: Rediscovering Jesus’ Genius (Eerdmans 2007); with Anson Rainey (Tel Aviv University) the monumental biblical atlas, The Sacred Bridge: Carta’s Atlas of the Biblical World (Carta Publishing 2005); with Ze’ev Safrai (Bar Ilan University) an annotated translation of Eusebius’ important description of Roman Palestine, Eusebius, Onomasticon: A Triglott Edition with Notes and Commentary (Brill 2005). More recently he rejoined Safrai for their second work, a pioneering collection and translation of the earliest rabbinic parables that provide the literary and religious context for the parables of Jesus, Parables of the Sages (Carta 2011).

Presenter at

Bible & Archaeology Fest XXI, November 16 – 18, 2018Historical Geography of the Gospels and the Myth of Q

Over the last 150 years an unassailable assumption of New Testament scholarship has been that Mark wrote his gospel first, and that it was subsequently used by Matthew and Luke in the composition of their gospels. To explain the content common to Matthew and Luke, but not present in Mark, it is suggested that they relied upon a hypothetical literary source that no longer exists. It is commonly designated as “Q” from the German term Quelle (source). In this presentation we will demonstrate that this literary model has paid insufficient attention to the historical and geographical realia in the gospels. We will bring several examples which quite simply cannot be reconciled with New Testament scholarship’s assumption about the literary development of the Gospel tradition. A challenge to the prevailing literary model is of no small consequence. Like lenses in a camera, a change in order and perspective inevitably means a change in the image that emerges of the historical Jesus, his life, and his message.

Bible & Archaeology Fest XX, November 17 – 19, 2017Unearthing Bethsaida-Julias: Has the City of the Apostles Been Found?

For the last two seasons archaeologists and volunteers from Kinneret College (Israel) and Nyack College (New York) have excavated at el-Araj, one of the possible locations for Bethsaida mentioned in the New Testament, Josephus, and other early Jewish sources. In August, headlines around the world announced that the city of the Apostles had finally been found. What was unearthed and why is it significant? How do the excavations at el-Araj compare with the historical picture we receive of Bethsaida-Julias from the written sources? Notley will present the findings from the second season of the El-Araj Excavation Project, which may have finally found evidence for Herod Philip’s urbanization of this fishing village on the Sea of Galilee, transforming it into a Jewish polis.

Bible & Archaeology Fest XIX, November 18 - 20, 2016Jesus in the Land

In this presentation we consider the contribution of recent archaeology to our understanding of events recorded in the Gospels. Jesus’ life and work were in the Land of Israel, and yet too often consideration of the physical setting for those events is all but ignored. Recent archaeological discoveries of early Roman remains at Yodfat, Migdal and Tel Rekhesh continue to challenge previous scholarly opinion about the cultural nature of the Galilee. It does not now appear to be the impoverished, uneducated, and religiously indifferent backwater assumed by previous generations of scholars. These mistaken perceptions likewise shaped assumptions regarding the historical Jesus and his place in Jewish life in the Galilee. We look at these archaeological finds and the new excavations at el-Araj (historically one of the candidates for New Testament Bethsaida), asking what they tell us about the setting for the Gospels. Recent archaeological efforts in Jerusalem have also called for a reappraisal of long-held notions. We will briefly consider what the salvage excavation from the Temple Mount can tell us about the way of the cross and the elusive lithostratos.